SZ/BU - Birmingham University

SZ/BU

Series

Birmingham University

1938-1993

23 boxes

University of Birmingham

SZ was Sands Cox Professor of Anatomy in the University of Birmingham from 1943 until his retirement in 1969.

SZ's appointment to the Sands Cox Chair in Anatomy at Birmingham University was a protracted business. He was offered the post in 1938, but "with his research productivity... at a peak and his contribution to reproductive physiology recognized" [P.L. Krohn, op. cit.] he hesitated, finally accepting the offer in 1940. By that time he was fully absorbed in his war work and did not move to Birmingham and take up the reins there until 1946. Professor Charles Smout took care of the Anatomy Department in the interim.

At Birmingham SZ set about "making a desert bloom" [S. Zuckerman, 'Men, Monkeys and Missiles', Collins, 1988] in the Anatomy Department. The premises were generous but ill-equipped, and SZ perceived an urgent need for new blood in the Faculty. This was largely provided by his recruitment of former colleagues and students. He began with a staff of six; twenty years later there were 125. Research personnel there were none when he arrived; he set about building a number of research groups.

The pre-clinical medical curriculum was thoroughly overhauled and the teaching of anatomy radically revised. SZ's approach was holistic; students spent less time in the dissecting room, and more time studying the subject in a broader context, and they were provided with a new textbook to suit the revised course [S. Zuckerman: 'A New System of Anatomy', Oxford University Press, 1961, revised 1981]. Most innovative was the research-based BSc that SZ devised for which some half-dozen of the brightest students were selected annually.

SZ also established a clean breeding line of laboratory monkeys in the Department, dispersed several years after his retirement, and a large collection of primate skulls and other skeletal material, which were transferred to the Natural History Museum in 1980.

Most of the contents are concentrated in files SZ/BU/8 and SZ/BU/9. Complementary correspondence and papers relating to SZ's scientific research is to be found in series SZ/SC, SZ/PUB, and SZ/GEN